With rapid development and growing ubiquity of wireless communication services, user expectations for the quality of wireless communication devices and networks increase. Correspondingly, an array of increasingly more sophisticated wireless communication systems and standards are developed and implemented.
The IEEE 802.16 standard and its constituent branches comprise one such standard. “WiMAX” is a term that is commonly used to refer to standard, interoperable implementations of IEEE 802.16 wireless systems and sub-systems. The bandwidth and physical range of WiMAX make it a suitable technology for a number of wireless applications, such as: connectivity for Wi-Fi hotspots; providing wireless “last mile” (or “last km”) broadband access; and providing high-speed mobile data and telecommunications services.
WiMAX designs a Proxy Mobile Internet Protocol (PMIP), which is a network entity called PMIP client with Mobile Internet Protocol (MIP) capabilities. The PMIP client will conduct Mobile IP operation on behalf of a Mobile Station (MS).
However, conventional Foreign Agent (FA) relocation methods present many problems. For example, Layer3 context, such as Quality of Service information, Accounting information, Service Flow (SF) information, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) proxy information maintained by Anchor Data Path Function (DPF), may be transferred from source to target during Layer2 handover phase, but this presents a problem if same context are maintained in two different places before FA is actually relocated; certain amount of node processing (at PMIP client) and network bandwidth or traffic may be wasted if a target FA refuses the relocation for some reason; and the conventional FA relocation procedure is not secure, since any network node may tell the PMIP client to register with a different FA, hence redirecting mobile traffic to somewhere else.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a system and method for foreign agent relocation that is secure, reliable and efficient.